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The 'war on terror' and its
paradoxes
By Jeremy Bransten
PRAGUE - One year ago today, US President George
W Bush stood before world leaders at the United Nations
General Assembly in New York and laid out the case for
taking action against Iraq.
Bush said Saddam
Hussein posed a "grave and gathering danger" to
international security, and he called on the world body
to approve the use of force, if necessary, to enforce UN
resolutions. But regardless of the Security Council's
decision, Bush said the United States had already
decided on its course of action.
"We cannot
stand by and do nothing while dangers gather. We must
stand up for our security and for the permanent rights
and the hopes of mankind. By heritage and by choice, the
United States of America will make that stand, and,
delegates to the United Nations, you have the power to
make that stand as well," Bush said.
The crux of
Bush's argument was that Saddam already possessed and
was further developing weapons of mass destruction. The
inability of coalition forces to find evidence of any
weapons of mass destruction, five months into their
occupation of Iraq, has cast doubt on this rationale for
the US-led invasion of the country.
In addition,
Bush alleged a link between the Iraqi regime and the
al-Qaeda terrorist organization, blamed for the 3,000
deaths in the United States on September 11, 2001.
"Iraq's government openly praised the attacks of
September 11. Al-Qaeda terrorists escaped from
Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq," he said.
The US administration based its assertion on,
among other things, the presence of camps containing
several hundred fighters from the Ansar al-Islam
terrorist group in northern Iraq. Most of those fighters
are believed to have either fled or to have been killed
during the US-led invasion of Iraq. Many are believed to
have since returned to Iraq, but their links to Saddam's
former regime and al-Qaeda remain unproven.
At
the time of the war, experts had not detected any other
international terrorist group with a major presence in
Iraq and none outside the country with a demonstrable
link to Saddam's regime. But many experts now fear that
a connection may be forming, paradoxically, thanks to
the US-led invasion and the chaos that has existed in
Iraq since Saddam's ouster.
Historian Youssef
Choueiri is an expert on modern Arab states and Islam at
the University of Exeter's Institute of Arab and Islamic
Studies in England. He said the US military, by its
occupation of Iraq, is acting as a magnet for a whole
range of anti-US terrorist groups. And he believes the
failure of the US administration to establish order in
post-Saddam Iraq has created ideal conditions for
terrorists and foreign fighters to enter the country.
"What [the Americans] did was simply to open
Iraq's international borders to international
terrorists, in the sense that they dissolved the Iraqi
army, the Iraqi security forces, and now anyone can
cross into Iraq from Iran, Turkey, even Syria, Saudi
Arabia, and Kuwait, and nobody will stop them. And this
is actually a ridiculous state of affairs, that a
country which was tightly controlled by a dictatorship
has descended into chaos as a result of the absence of
any planning for postwar Iraq," Choueiri said.
Richard Evans, an analyst at Jane's Terrorism
Intelligence Centre in Britain, said that prior to the
war, by all accounts, Saddam's secular regime and
Islamic radicals loyal to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin
Laden had little in common. The extent to which they
have managed to establish links in today's occupied Iraq
remains unclear.
"On the face of it, you would
imagine that bin Laden and those with his outlook
wouldn't really have a great deal of time for a
Ba'athist regime like that which Saddam represented,"
Evans said. "What the situation now, of course, is on
the ground in Iraq is the big question. To what extent
would remnants of the Ba'ath regime or Saddam's security
forces be hooking up with the jihadi fighters, whether
that is Ansar al-Islam or al-Qaeda operatives or whoever
it might be, sharing weapons, equipment, or expertise?"
According to Choueiri, no such linkup is
necessary for the kinds of terrorist attacks that have
rocked Iraq in recent weeks to continue, given the
current porousness of Iraq's borders. "They don't have
to agree ideologically or philosophically. They don't
even have to meet. They both have the same aim. They
want to drive out the occupation, and they work
according to different methods, and they operate on the
basis of different programs, but they share a common
view of things on the ground. And I don't think there is
actually any concrete coordination between Saddam
Hussein on the one hand and Osama bin Laden on the
other," Choueiri said.
Evans questioned the view
put forward of al-Qaeda as a vast, hydra-like monster,
directing terrorist operations in scores of countries
around the world. "It's very tempting to regard every
major attack in the light of [September 11] as being an
al-Qaeda terrorist plot or in some way influenced by
al-Qaeda," he said. "In many cases, when you peel back
the layers, that's probably not the case."
Evans
and other experts say bin Laden and his associates are
just one part of the global terrorism picture. Although
they may inspire other groups to carry out terrorist
actions, the links among them are often illusory. "In
short, what you're dealing with now is a global radical
Islamic terrorist movement, of which al-Qaeda, ie bin
Laden and his small collective of immediate associates,
[is] just one part," Evans said.
"An awful lot
of attacks which I think in recent months have been
claimed in the name of al-Qaeda probably had nothing to
do with al-Qaeda at all. But I think the ideology has
acquired a following of its own, and you'll find that
there are Islamic radical terrorist networks in various
regions around the world that will want to see
themselves as being associated with this broad global
Islamic front."
Choueiri said that, far from
defeating terrorism, the United States' military
involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan - and what appears
to be the failure of US forces to establish nationwide
stability in either country - may be inspiring terrorist
groups.
"The result of this is actually a clear
indication to all these groups that America does not
have a clear strategy beyond using brute force, and the
reaction to this is an increase in terrorism rather than
a decrease in terrorist attacks," Choueiri said. "And
we've seen this in Indonesia, in the Philippines, across
the Middle East, as well as in Europe itself. That is,
terrorist attacks, operations - even aborted ones - have
actually increased, despite the increase in security
measures and other policy decisions which were made to
curb terrorism."
At commemorations last week to
mark the second anniversary of the September 11
terrorist attacks, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
explicitly rejected this argument, saying that the
United States' military involvement in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and other countries is helping to defeat
terrorism, not fan it. "We know that if we do not fight
the terrorists over there in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and
across the world, then we will have to face them here,
and many more innocent men, women, and children, as well
as the patriots defending them, will perish," Rumsfeld
said.
And Bush reiterated his belief that Iraq
is the "major front" in the "war on terrorism", and that
progress is being made. "We are fighting this war [on
terror] on a lot of fronts, the major front of which is
now in Iraq. And we're making steady progress toward
achieving our objective, and we will continue to make
progress," he said.
In London, meanwhile, a
parliamentary report said British intelligence chiefs
had warned Prime Minister Tony Blair - Bush's closest
ally in the war on Iraq - that military action against
Iraq would make it easier for terrorist groups to obtain
chemical and biological weapons.
The country's
Joint Intelligence Committee also concluded that the
threat from al-Qaeda would be heightened by military
action against Iraq.
Copyright 2003 RFE/RL
Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW,
Washington, DC 20036.
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